Writer-actors Freeman Gosden as Amosand Charles Correll as Andy in 1929 – two minstrel-style white actors playing Black characters Amos n Andy – stereotypically uneducated and living in NY’s Harlem neighborhood from the 1920s on was the most popular program on radio in the 1930s – 40 million mostly white people listened, but persisted despite a 1931 campaign by Robert L. Van, publisher and editor of the pioneer Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier to shut it down as racist. Hundreds of thousands signed on to rid the airwaves of the demeaning show, although, even white liberals and many black folks enjoyed the nightly antics of Amos n Andy, Kingfish, Sapphire and many of the other ongoing characters they encountered. As a kid in the 1940s, I was among them. Some of their work could be very funny. The series ran essentially from 1928 through 1960 on both radio and eventually television, where Black actors stepped in.

Amy Goodman and DemocracyNOW! aired this segment in October of 2011 as part of an interview with Amy’s colleague, Juan Gonzalez, and his co-author, Joe Torres of Free Press, the media reform advocacy group where he remains Senior External Affairs Director. Torres and González co-authored their 2011 book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, a history of American media’s portrayal of people of color with special focus on media outlets owned and controlled by people of color, and how they were suppressed—sometimes violently—by mainstream political, corporate and media leaders.

I had the opportunity back in 2011 to record today’s interview with Joe Torres on his way through the Twin Cities as a guest of Main Street Project. The interview never aired here because its quality was not what I considered airworthy at the time. But in looking for a program for today’s TTT in our archive, I listened once again to its content, and, with the hope that you’ll be patient with its echo-y quality – we were in the back room of the Louisiana Café in St. Paul – Joe Torres has much to say about race in the media and media reform.

Again – the Torres-Gonzalez book is News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Torres advocates in Washington for media policies that serve the public interest and works to builds coalitions to broaden the media reform movement's base. He writes frequently on media and Internet issues and serves on the board of directors of the Center for Media Justice and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. Earning a degree in communications from the College of Staten Island, Torres was, for a time deputy director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and a journalist for several years.

Obviously we can’t take phone calls, but you’re welcome to give feedback to us on our Facebook Page – Facebook.com/TruthToTell or Tweet us @TTTAndyDriscoll

Darul Arqam is a small school in the City of Blaine designed to teach Muslim children to memorize the Quran – the central religious text of the Islamic faith and believed to be the verbatim word of God, whom Muslims call Allah. That, it turns out, is one heck of a lot of memorization – nearly 600 pages – 114 chapters. Quran (or Qu’ran, or Koran, if you wish) actually means “recite” and it’s the religious duty of Muslims to recite the word of Allah at will.

[By the way, it may surprise readers to know that much of the Quran incorporates some of the same Old Testament scripture assumed by Christians and Jews to be the word of their God: From Wikipedia: “…Muslims regard the Quran as the main miracle of Muhammad, the proof of his prophethood and the culmination of a series of divine messages that started with the messages revealed to Adam, regarded in Islam as the first prophet, and continued with the Scrolls of Abraham (Suhuf Ibrahim), the Tawrat (Torah) of Moses, the Zabur(Tehillim or Psalms) of David,[14][15] and the Injil (Gospels) of Jesus. – Wikipedia]

All this to say that it seems a simple matter to approve a proposal to establish a school that rarely teaches to more than 18 or 20 students at a crack. And, certainly no threat to any community. But, wait…xenophobia reigns!

· Some neighbors submitted a petition with 80 signatures from approximately 50 houses in the neighborhood. One speaker stated that only 3 houses did not sign the petition.

· Instead of calling it by its name or referring to it as a school in both the petition and Planning Commission meeting, opponents referred to it as a “training center.” (for what – terrorism? Well, certainly!)

· The opposition questioned where the organization’s funds are coming from:

o “I also am wondering...it concerns me that...they are offering this and targeting this for children, economically challenged families and a lot of their funding is donations. I don't know the ins and outs of how their organization is structured but I have some concerns about that, about how they are going to fund this.”

· Fear was rampant:

o “My wife's been just terrified that somebody is going to grab her child.”

o “I don't know who these people are but they have no business coming into the end of my block. Obviously, I just found out two days ago that there is a Muslim community that wants to teach Muslim to their people and they say they're not going to be a ‘religious organization.’ It is a religious organization, it's a church. That' my personal feelings.”

o “We don't want them in our community.”

This is the fifth land use opposition case involving Muslims in Minnesota within the past two years. A week later, the City Council voted 5-0 to approve the school..

If that were a completely isolated example, we’d not bother, but these incidents, as well as more violent reactions, fed by many news media, especially rightwing cable news companies or mainstream outlets who should know better, but, nevertheless, prey on such fears for profit and political expediency, have multiplied at the local and national level since 9/11.

The hysteria surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001, have only been reinforced by other events in which those involved who consider themselves Muslim – or are “suspected” of being so – are hoisted on the petard of journalism’s voracious appetite for titillation and added to the cumulative evidence that “those people” have infiltrated our culture at every level and are prepared to destroy the American Way of Life – whatever that is. Once the media gets hold of a story, the public extrapolates localized facts into badly distorted generalizations about a nation at war with The Other. Witness the ripple effect of the Boston Marathon bombings and the deranged Army major who most people claim was driven to his violent acts against fellow officers by his Islamic conviction.

What drives our need to drag everyone who looks and worships like others into a war of nerves and rejection when just one of them has been adjudged guilty of a crime, especially assaultive behavior? Why has this country come to this in the last decade: that because of the religious fervor seemingly behind the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center and the assumption that religious fundamentalism elsewhere is somehow less acceptable than the same demonstrated among evangelists here and that all of Islam is dedicated irrevocably to our cultural and political destruction, not to mention murders in our beds?

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with representatives of our local Muslim communities (yes, that’s plural) and their advocates to get their sense of what they’re up against and how, like other groups of color and vilified minorities, they are forced to cope with the expressed fears – subtle and not so – as Islamic refugees and immigrants settle our area in larger and larger numbers. These include Somalis and other East Africans, Indians, Arabs, Iranians/Persians, Palestinians, Turks, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Indonesians, among others.

Darul Arqam is a small school in the City of Blaine designed to teach Muslim children to memorize the Quran – the central religious text of the Islamic faith and believed to be the verbatim word of God, whom Muslims call Allah. That, it turns out, is one heck of a lot of memorization – nearly 600 pages – 114 chapters. Quran (or Qu’ran, or Koran, if you wish) actually means “recite” and it’s the religious duty of Muslims to recite the word of Allah at will.

[By the way, it may surprise readers to know that much of the Quran incorporates some of the same Old Testament scripture assumed by Christians and Jews to be the word of their God: From Wikipedia: “…Muslims regard the Quran as the main miracle of Muhammad, the proof of his prophethood and the culmination of a series of divine messages that started with the messages revealed to Adam, regarded in Islam as the first prophet, and continued with the Scrolls of Abraham (Suhuf Ibrahim), the Tawrat (Torah) of Moses, the Zabur(Tehillim or Psalms) of David,[14][15] and the Injil (Gospels) of Jesus. – Wikipedia]

All this to say that it seems a simple matter to approve a proposal to establish a school that rarely teaches to more than 18 or 20 students at a crack. And, certainly no threat to any community. But, wait…xenophobia reigns!

· Some neighbors submitted a petition with 80 signatures from approximately 50 houses in the neighborhood. One speaker stated that only 3 houses did not sign the petition.

· Instead of calling it by its name or referring to it as a school in both the petition and Planning Commission meeting, opponents referred to it as a “training center.” (for what – terrorism? Well, certainly!)

· The opposition questioned where the organization’s funds are coming from:

o “I also am wondering...it concerns me that...they are offering this and targeting this for children, economically challenged families and a lot of their funding is donations. I don't know the ins and outs of how their organization is structured but I have some concerns about that, about how they are going to fund this.”

· Fear was rampant:

o “My wife's been just terrified that somebody is going to grab her child.”

o “I don't know who these people are but they have no business coming into the end of my block. Obviously, I just found out two days ago that there is a Muslim community that wants to teach Muslim to their people and they say they're not going to be a ‘religious organization.’ It is a religious organization, it's a church. That' my personal feelings.”

o “We don't want them in our community.”

This is the fifth land use opposition case involving Muslims in Minnesota within the past two years. A week later, the City Council voted 5-0 to approve the school..

If that were a completely isolated example, we’d not bother, but these incidents, as well as more violent reactions, fed by many news media, especially rightwing cable news companies or mainstream outlets who should know better, but, nevertheless, prey on such fears for profit and political expediency, have multiplied at the local and national level since 9/11.

The hysteria surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001, have only been reinforced by other events in which those involved who consider themselves Muslim – or are “suspected” of being so – are hoisted on the petard of journalism’s voracious appetite for titillation and added to the cumulative evidence that “those people” have infiltrated our culture at every level and are prepared to destroy the American Way of Life – whatever that is. Once the media gets hold of a story, the public extrapolates localized facts into badly distorted generalizations about a nation at war with The Other. Witness the ripple effect of the Boston Marathon bombings and the deranged Army major who most people claim was driven to his violent acts against fellow officers by his Islamic conviction.

What drives our need to drag everyone who looks and worships like others into a war of nerves and rejection when just one of them has been adjudged guilty of a crime, especially assaultive behavior? Why has this country come to this in the last decade: that because of the religious fervor seemingly behind the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center and the assumption that religious fundamentalism elsewhere is somehow less acceptable than the same demonstrated among evangelists here and that all of Islam is dedicated irrevocably to our cultural and political destruction, not to mention murders in our beds?

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with representatives of our local Muslim communities (yes, that’s plural) and their advocates to get their sense of what they’re up against and how, like other groups of color and vilified minorities, they are forced to cope with the expressed fears – subtle and not so – as Islamic refugees and immigrants settle our area in larger and larger numbers. These include Somalis and other East Africans, Indians, Arabs, Iranians/Persians, Palestinians, Turks, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Indonesians, among others.

Does any one of us know precisely what is and what is not guaranteed by the Constitution by way of individual or privacy or free assembly, free press or free speech? Are such freedoms once assumed so easily limited by the laws and rules Congress passes and the Administration invokes. In other words – is our right to privacy threatened by our obsession with security?

Many advocates claim that government is illegally spying on us, threatening jail time and even physical injury if we speak out or peacefully and civilly disobey, tried for treason by turning to press freedoms to expose the government’s own obsession secrecy – its insistence that all things sensitive should be kept from public scrutiny, thus over-classified.Facts support this claim.

No one in power wants the eyes of their constituents prying into their business, even in what purports to a democracy that exists at the will and pleasure of those constituents – the voters, the citizens. This sense of entitlement to secrecy extends to all levels of government and the transactions they’d rather you knew nothing about, including wiretapping Americans, possibly you, and Internet spying. It won’t be long before those same powers come a-calling to ask you to keep them in power, insisting they’ve operated and behaved transparently and entirely in your interest, the public interest.

Well, we know better. The quest for secrecy in the halls of power has far more often than not been exposed for the damage it has done to the national and local good – not its exposure, and certainly not if the laws and constitutional provisions designed to rein in power have been thwarted to preserve it.

The increasingly accelerating imposition of secrecy, extreme prosecutions and punishments inflicted for shattering it, the extraordinarily expanding exercise of police powers to beat in skulls and arrest demonstrators and dissenters, the global hounding of leakers on charges of treason and the spying so-called national security agencies engage in the name of protecting us from faceless enemies, and not our freedoms when those freedoms mean the most, are emerging as the prime issues confronting our personal and electronic liberty in an age when the lines between the latter and the former so easily blur.

CAN WE STOP IT?

This week, we look at those questions at every level and try to get idea of whether or not this juggernaut can be brought to heel before even our most progressive policymakers have become irretrievably corrupted by their own hubris and the admonishments of the military and policy technocrats, not to mention the corporate media hounds that pretend to demand press freedoms for themselves but fail to call their governments to account for their anti-democratic ploddings.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with just three of the many local and national civil rights privacy and media justice activists immersed in this intensifying and alarming decline in Constitutional compliance.

Darul Arqam is a small school in the City of Blaine designed to teach Muslim children to memorize the Quran – the central religious text of the Islamic faith and believed to be the verbatim word of God, whom Muslims call Allah. That, it turns out, is one heck of a lot of memorization – nearly 600 pages – 114 chapters. Quran (or Qu’ran, or Koran, if you wish) actually means “recite” and it’s the religious duty of Muslims to recite the word of Allah at will.

[By the way, it may surprise readers to know that much of the Quran incorporates some of the same Old Testament scripture assumed by Christians and Jews to be the word of their God: From Wikipedia: “…Muslims regard the Quran as the main miracle of Muhammad, the proof of his prophethood and the culmination of a series of divine messages that started with the messages revealed to Adam, regarded in Islam as the first prophet, and continued with the Scrolls of Abraham (Suhuf Ibrahim), the Tawrat (Torah) of Moses, the Zabur (Tehillim or Psalms) of David,[14][15] and the Injil (Gospels) of Jesus. – Wikipedia]

All this to say that it seems a simple matter to approve a proposal to establish a school that rarely teaches to more than 18 or 20 students at a crack. And, certainly no threat to any community. But, wait…xenophobia reigns!

· Some neighbors submitted a petition with 80 signatures from approximately 50 houses in the neighborhood. One speaker stated that only 3 houses did not sign the petition.

· Instead of calling it by its name or referring to it as a school in both the petition and Planning Commission meeting, opponents referred to it as a “training center.” (for what – terrorism? Well, certainly!)

· The opposition questioned where the organization’s funds are coming from:

o “I also am wondering...it concerns me that...they are offering this and targeting this for children, economically challenged families and a lot of their funding is donations. I don't know the ins and outs of how their organization is structured but I have some concerns about that, about how they are going to fund this.”

· Fear was rampant:

o “My wife's been just terrified that somebody is going to grab her child.”

o “I don't know who these people are but they have no business coming into the end of my block. Obviously, I just found out two days ago that there is a Muslim community that wants to teach Muslim to their people and they say they're not going to be a ‘religious organization.’ It is a religious organization, it's a church. That' my personal feelings.”

o “We don't want them in our community.”

This is the fifth land use opposition case involving Muslims in Minnesota within the past two years. A week later, the City Council voted 5-0 to approve the school..

If that were a completely isolated example, we’d not bother, but these incidents, as well as more violent reactions, fed by many news media, especially rightwing cable news companies or mainstream outlets who should know better, but, nevertheless, prey on such fears for profit and political expediency, have multiplied at the local and national level since 9/11.

The hysteria surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001, have only been reinforced by other events in which those involved who consider themselves Muslim – or are “suspected” of being so – are hoisted on the petard of journalism’s voracious appetite for titillation and added to the cumulative evidence that “those people” have infiltrated our culture at every level and are prepared to destroy the American Way of Life – whatever that is. Once the media gets hold of a story, the public extrapolates localized facts into badly distorted generalizations about a nation at war with The Other. Witness the ripple effect of the Boston Marathon bombings and the deranged Army major who most people claim was driven to his violent acts against fellow officers by his Islamic conviction.

What drives our need to drag everyone who looks and worships like others into a war of nerves and rejection when just one of them has been adjudged guilty of a crime, especially assaultive behavior? Why has this country come to this in the last decade: that because of the religious fervor seemingly behind the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center and the assumption that religious fundamentalism elsewhere is somehow less acceptable than the same demonstrated among evangelists here and that all of Islam is dedicated irrevocably to our cultural and political destruction, not to mention murders in our beds?

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with representatives of our local Muslim communities (yes, that’s plural) and their advocates to get their sense of what they’re up against and how, like other groups of color and vilified minorities, they are forced to cope with the expressed fears – subtle and not so – as Islamic refugees and immigrants settle our area in larger and larger numbers. These include Somalis and other East Africans, Indians, Arabs, Iranians/Persians, Palestinians, Turks, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Indonesians, among others.

HELP US BRING YOU THESE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS OF COMMUNITY INTEREST – PLEASE DONATE HERE!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The baffling thing about poverty, like other societal maladies, apparently, is that, despite the dry, old statistics showing incredible increases in poverty, the decline in median incomes, the rise in homelessness and the decline in public assistance, the increase in foreclosures and the plunge in property values – the gap widens – and the people in power really don’t seem to give a damn.

What is it going to take – a complete collapse (as if we’re not already witnessing one) of our economic infrastructure before middle-class suburbanites take up arms against The Man and find themselves in the same place as the poor and people of color have been for decades – on the business end of a police officer’s 9mm Glock or Billy-club, a pepper-spray can or tear-gas canister for their trouble?

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps, that will be the only time a march on the banks and politicians will yield some results and policies will change and wealth will be shared.

But, leave us not hold our breath.

Average citizens/residents are feeling the pinch created by people and institutions who literally could care less – because they seem to have no depths to their lack of caring.

Poverty is NOT one of those conditions that will get better by the pulling up of bootstraps.Poverty is a societal disease that needs a major injection and infusion of capital – real capital – money and other resources. Anything else is a punishment inflicted on people who have less than the people making the decisions and who spend much of their legislative or administrative time and capital denying others their fair share of a pie they keep shrinking.

How bad is it?

Cynthia Boyd of MinnPost.com wrote last Fall:

Nationally, the poverty rate is 15.1 percent, while Minnesota ranks 13th lowest in the nation in numbers of those living below the poverty line ($11,344 for an individual or $22,113 household income for a family of four), but the state's numbers have increased significantly from 2007-2008. The poverty rate then was 9.6 percent.

The effects play out in the state in concrete ways. Human ServicesCommissioner Lucinda Jessontold MinnPost last month that 104,000 more Minnesotans have signed on for food support this year compared to last.

In 2009-2010, 560,000 Minnesotans lived in poverty, or roughly one out of ten state residents. That represents a 2.1 percentage point increase from 2006-07. Nationwide, 46.2 million people were in poverty in 2010.

Even more staggering, the preliminary numbers show that over the last decade, Minnesota’s median household income fell from $65,120 in 1999-2000 to $54,785 in 2009-2010, or by more than $10,000, after adjusting for inflation. Only Michigan experienced a larger decline in median income during the same period.

John Woodwick, executive director of the Minnesota Valley Action Councilin Mankato, said the number of people in the nine-county area served by MVAC rose from 16,292 in 2000 to 26,233 in 2009, an increase of 61 percent.

During the same period, federal and state funding for MVAC’s (poverty-related) services has decreased 21 percent on a per-person basis. In 2000, MVAC received a total of $793 in federal and state funds for every person living in poverty in the south-central Minnesota service area. By 2009, funding had decreased to $627 per person, according to MVAC’s annual budgets.

“We haven’t seen lately the massive layoffs we’ve seen in the last two years, but the new hires aren’t happening either,” Woodwick said. “And many people haven’t been able to locate work, especially not at what their previous wages were.”

The once-reliable Minnesota, Metro and regional foundations have cut their humans services funding, sometimes by half, even as many nonprofits and advocacy groups came to believe philanthropy would fill the gaps political types either created or refused to fill.

This year’s legislative session almost made a complete disaster of its humans services bill(s), but escaped some of the worst cuts tendered for passage by Republican bill sponsors, perhaps in the face of sure vetoes by Governor Mark Dayton. But, this is all relative, is it not?

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with just four of the many Minnesota advocates whose ulcer-ridden work continues to be a war against the disproportionate impact of rightwing politics and a struggling economy that gives the policymakers the excuse to cut further into the lives of the people they blame for being poor: the poor themselves.

MORE RESOURCES:

PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley said on "Face the Nation" Sunday that poverty in America "threatens our very democracy," and that it threatens our national security.

Smiley and Princeton Professor Cornel West, co-authors of the new book The Rich and the Rest of Us (Smiley Books), talked to host Bob Schieffer about how half of Americans - 150 million people - are poor, which they defined as living one or two paychecks away from poverty.

"There seems to be a bipartisan consensus in this town - and you know how hard that is to do - but a bipartisan consensus that the poor just don't matter, that poverty is just not an important issue," Smiley said. "We cannot abide another campaign for the White House where the issue of poverty isn't raised higher on the American agenda."

MOST RECENT SHOW

PLEASE HELP US BRING YOU THESE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS OF COMMUNITY INTEREST – PLEASE DONATE HERE!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I sometimes think that, for all the talk about race we think we’re hearing, that incidents involving clear human and civil rights infractions – whether individually perpetrated (physical and psychological violence), or institutionally perpetuated (segregation, employment discrimination, environmental injustice, voter suppression, economic and health disparities, housing discrimination and predatory lending) – are seen as essentially isolated occurrences and not the culturally and emotionally, therefore institutionally, manifestations of embedded sickness in a society whose history belies its founding principles embodied in the Declaration and Constitution and Bill of Rights. We are NOT facing race as a reality in this culture. We are NOT talking honestly about this leprosy of democracy – at least as much as we ignore the other pestilence destroying democracy: homeland security and the misuse of law enforcement to turn average citizens and journalists into criminals.

African-American folk, American Indians, Latinos, Asians – and now, with a vengeance, Arabic and Muslim citizens and immigrants – have all felt the sting of racial separation in all those categories, considered The Other in this country on so many levels, one wonders if we can recover from the parasites that infuse our rhetoric and official behavior such that the harm inflicted could be permanent.

It must be difficult, if not impossible, for majorities of our brethren and sisters of color to hold out hope for any sort of positive outcomes of any effort to work in concert with the white community and white-run institutions to bring honesty and open dialogue to the table to expose that embedded fear and loathing for its very real danger to our nation’s economic and political stability.

Not all answers can be covered by dialogue only, of course, but that’s where it must begin. Many groups in our communities of color – and, yes, among white folks as well – are taking a stab at such opportunities as present themselves for opening up the conversations necessary to start the ball rolling. But, the question remains – and we will ask it: after the discussion, what? What will participants do as next steps to move to outcomes that serve the communities in ways that bring very real change. How much is geography responsible for the continued isolation among such communities – in institutions – churches, schools, governments, companies and unions? Can we breach the physical segregation by breaching the psychological and emotional separation among peoples that share this larger space of ours?

Again this year, the evening following our show featuring some key presenters and awardees, the The Saint Paul Foundation’s Facing Race Initiative will present its awards to outstanding mentors of this notion of addressing race and its implications for their own and other communities. Last year’s Honorable Mention, author, filmmaker and Native language advocate, Dr. Anton Treuer, will give this year’s keynoter. Old hands at combating racism, like Macalester Professor Emeritus Mahmoud El-Kati and Steve Pederson, an executive leadership team member with Diversity Resource Action Alliance up in Alexandria will be recognized as Ambassadors, along with Honorable Mentions emerging business inclusion coordinator Elizabeth A. Campbell for contractorsRyan Companies US, Inc.; Taneeza S. Islam, Esq., civil rights director, Center for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-MN Chapter; and T. Gregory Stavrou, executive director of the Rochester Civic Theatre. The free program will be held at St. Paul’s Crowne Plaza Riverfront at Wabasha and Kellogg Blvd. starting at 6:00 PM, with hors d’oeuvres, program at 7:00.

HELP US BRING YOU THESE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS OF COMMUNITY INTEREST – PLEASE DONATE HERE!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The baffling thing about poverty, like other societal maladies, apparently, is that, despite the dry, old statistics showing incredible increases in poverty, the decline in median incomes, the rise in homelessness and the decline in public assistance, the increase in foreclosures and the plunge in property values – the gap widens – and the people in power really don’t seem to give a damn.

What is it going to take – a complete collapse (as if we’re not already witnessing one) of our economic infrastructure before middle-class suburbanites take up arms against The Man and find themselves in the same place as the poor and people of color have been for decades – on the business end of a police officer’s 9mm Glock or Billy-club, a pepper-spray can or tear-gas canister for their trouble?

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps, that will be the only time a march on the banks and politicians will yield some results and policies will change and wealth will be shared.

But, leave us not hold our breath.

Average citizens/residents are feeling the pinch created by people and institutions who literally could care less – because they seem to have no depths to their lack of caring.

Poverty is NOT one of those conditions that will get better by the pulling up of bootstraps.Poverty is a societal disease that needs a major injection and infusion of capital – real capital – money and other resources. Anything else is a punishment inflicted on people who have less than the people making the decisions and who spend much of their legislative or administrative time and capital denying others their fair share of a pie they keep shrinking.

How bad is it?

Cynthia Boyd of MinnPost.com wrote last Fall:

Nationally, the poverty rate is 15.1 percent, while Minnesota ranks 13th lowest in the nation in numbers of those living below the poverty line ($11,344 for an individual or $22,113 household income for a family of four), but the state's numbers have increased significantly from 2007-2008. The poverty rate then was 9.6 percent.

The effects play out in the state in concrete ways. Human ServicesCommissioner Lucinda Jessontold MinnPost last month that 104,000 more Minnesotans have signed on for food support this year compared to last.

In 2009-2010, 560,000 Minnesotans lived in poverty, or roughly one out of ten state residents. That represents a 2.1 percentage point increase from 2006-07. Nationwide, 46.2 million people were in poverty in 2010.

Even more staggering, the preliminary numbers show that over the last decade, Minnesota’s median household income fell from $65,120 in 1999-2000 to $54,785 in 2009-2010, or by more than $10,000, after adjusting for inflation. Only Michigan experienced a larger decline in median income during the same period.

John Woodwick, executive director of the Minnesota Valley Action Councilin Mankato, said the number of people in the nine-county area served by MVAC rose from 16,292 in 2000 to 26,233 in 2009, an increase of 61 percent.

During the same period, federal and state funding for MVAC’s (poverty-related) services has decreased 21 percent on a per-person basis. In 2000, MVAC received a total of $793 in federal and state funds for every person living in poverty in the south-central Minnesota service area. By 2009, funding had decreased to $627 per person, according to MVAC’s annual budgets.

“We haven’t seen lately the massive layoffs we’ve seen in the last two years, but the new hires aren’t happening either,” Woodwick said. “And many people haven’t been able to locate work, especially not at what their previous wages were.”

The once-reliable Minnesota, Metro and regional foundations have cut their humans services funding, sometimes by half, even as many nonprofits and advocacy groups came to believe philanthropy would fill the gaps political types either created or refused to fill.

This year’s legislative session almost made a complete disaster of its humans services bill(s), but escaped some of the worst cuts tendered for passage by Republican bill sponsors, perhaps in the face of sure vetoes by Governor Mark Dayton. But, this is all relative, is it not?

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with just four of the many Minnesota advocates whose ulcer-ridden work continues to be a war against the disproportionate impact of rightwing politics and a struggling economy that gives the policymakers the excuse to cut further into the lives of the people they blame for being poor: the poor themselves.

MORE RESOURCES:

PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley said on "Face the Nation" Sunday that poverty in America "threatens our very democracy," and that it threatens our national security.

Smiley and Princeton Professor Cornel West, co-authors of the new book The Rich and the Rest of Us (Smiley Books), talked to host Bob Schieffer about how half of Americans - 150 million people - are poor, which they defined as living one or two paychecks away from poverty.

"There seems to be a bipartisan consensus in this town - and you know how hard that is to do - but a bipartisan consensus that the poor just don't matter, that poverty is just not an important issue," Smiley said. "We cannot abide another campaign for the White House where the issue of poverty isn't raised higher on the American agenda."

MOST RECENT SHOW

PLEASE HELP US BRING YOU THESE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS OF COMMUNITY INTEREST – PLEASE DONATE HERE!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I sometimes think that, for all the talk about race we think we’re hearing, that incidents involving clear human and civil rights infractions – whether individually perpetrated (physical and psychological violence), or institutionally perpetuated (segregation, employment discrimination, environmental injustice, voter suppression, economic and health disparities, housing discrimination and predatory lending) – are seen as essentially isolated occurrences and not the culturally and emotionally, therefore institutionally, manifestations of embedded sickness in a society whose history belies its founding principles embodied in the Declaration and Constitution and Bill of Rights. We are NOT facing race as a reality in this culture. We are NOT talking honestly about this leprosy of democracy – at least as much as we ignore the other pestilence destroying democracy: homeland security and the misuse of law enforcement to turn average citizens and journalists into criminals.

African-American folk, American Indians, Latinos, Asians – and now, with a vengeance, Arabic and Muslim citizens and immigrants – have all felt the sting of racial separation in all those categories, considered The Other in this country on so many levels, one wonders if we can recover from the parasites that infuse our rhetoric and official behavior such that the harm inflicted could be permanent.

It must be difficult, if not impossible, for majorities of our brethren and sisters of color to hold out hope for any sort of positive outcomes of any effort to work in concert with the white community and white-run institutions to bring honesty and open dialogue to the table to expose that embedded fear and loathing for its very real danger to our nation’s economic and political stability.

Not all answers can be covered by dialogue only, of course, but that’s where it must begin. Many groups in our communities of color – and, yes, among white folks as well – are taking a stab at such opportunities as present themselves for opening up the conversations necessary to start the ball rolling. But, the question remains – and we will ask it: after the discussion, what? What will participants do as next steps to move to outcomes that serve the communities in ways that bring very real change. How much is geography responsible for the continued isolation among such communities – in institutions – churches, schools, governments, companies and unions? Can we breach the physical segregation by breaching the psychological and emotional separation among peoples that share this larger space of ours?

Again this year, the evening following our show featuring some key presenters and awardees, the The Saint Paul Foundation’s Facing Race Initiative will present its awards to outstanding mentors of this notion of addressing race and its implications for their own and other communities. Last year’s Honorable Mention, author, filmmaker and Native language advocate, Dr. Anton Treuer, will give this year’s keynoter. Old hands at combating racism, like Macalester Professor Emeritus Mahmoud El-Kati and Steve Pederson, an executive leadership team member with Diversity Resource Action Alliance up in Alexandria will be recognized as Ambassadors, along with Honorable Mentions emerging business inclusion coordinator Elizabeth A. Campbell for contractorsRyan Companies US, Inc.; Taneeza S. Islam, Esq., civil rights director, Center for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-MN Chapter; and T. Gregory Stavrou, executive director of the Rochester Civic Theatre. The free program will be held at St. Paul’s Crowne Plaza Riverfront at Wabasha and Kellogg Blvd. starting at 6:00 PM, with hors d’oeuvres, program at 7:00.

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I sometimes think that, for all the talk about race we think we’re hearing, that incidents involving clear human and civil rights infractions – whether individually perpetrated (physical and psychological violence), or institutionally perpetuated (segregation, employment discrimination, environmental injustice, voter suppression, economic and health disparities, housing discrimination and predatory lending) – are seen as essentially isolated occurrences and not the culturally and emotionally, therefore institutionally, manifestations of embedded sickness in a society whose history belies its founding principles embodied in the Declaration and Constitution and Bill of Rights. We are NOT facing race as a reality in this culture. We are NOT talking honestly about this leprosy of democracy – at least as much as we ignore the other pestilence destroying democracy: homeland security and the misuse of law enforcement to turn average citizens and journalists into criminals.

African-American folk, American Indians, Latinos, Asians – and now, with a vengeance, Arabic and Muslim citizens and immigrants – have all felt the sting of racial separation in all those categories, considered The Other in this country on so many levels, one wonders if we can recover from the parasites that infuse our rhetoric and official behavior such that the harm inflicted could be permanent.

It must be difficult, if not impossible, for majorities of our brethren and sisters of color to hold out hope for any sort of positive outcomes of any effort to work in concert with the white community and white-run institutions to bring honesty and open dialogue to the table to expose that embedded fear and loathing for its very real danger to our nation’s economic and political stability.

Not all answers can be covered by dialogue only, of course, but that’s where it must begin. Many groups in our communities of color – and, yes, among white folks as well – are taking a stab at such opportunities as present themselves for opening up the conversations necessary to start the ball rolling. But, the question remains – and we will ask it: after the discussion, what? What will participants do as next steps to move to outcomes that serve the communities in ways that bring very real change. How much is geography responsible for the continued isolation among such communities – in institutions – churches, schools, governments, companies and unions? Can we breach the physical segregation by breaching the psychological and emotional separation among peoples that share this larger space of ours?

Again this year, the evening following our show featuring some key presenters and awardees, the The Saint Paul Foundation’s Facing Race Initiative will present its awards to outstanding mentors of this notion of addressing race and its implications for their own and other communities. Last year’s Honorable Mention, author, filmmaker and Native language advocate, Dr. Anton Treuer, will give this year’s keynoter. Old hands at combating racism, like Macalester Professor Emeritus Mahmoud El-Kati and Steve Pederson, an executive leadership team member with Diversity Resource Action Alliance up in Alexandria will be recognized as Ambassadors, along with Honorable Mentions emerging business inclusion coordinator Elizabeth A. Campbell for contractorsRyan Companies US, Inc.; Taneeza S. Islam, Esq., civil rights director, Center for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-MN Chapter; and T. Gregory Stavrou, executive director of the Rochester Civic Theatre. The free program will be held at St. Paul’s Crowne Plaza Riverfront at Wabasha and Kellogg Blvd. starting at 6:00 PM, with hors d’oeuvres, program at 7:00.